Threats (8 page)

“We've been talking to a few coworkers of your wife,” Chico said. “Nobody said anything against you, but they all did have the same issue.”

“An issue.” David dug around the piece of paper, trying to make unnoticeable motions, careful not to rip the page.

“They all mentioned the fact that you're never around. A few of them joked that they didn't think you really existed. Only one of them claimed to have even met you.”

“They came over and cut my hair three weeks ago.”

Chico looked at Dr. Walls, who set aside the newspaper and produced a pad of sticky notes. She wrote something on one. The water came to a full boil while David was reaching his hand into the sugar bag to grasp the corner of the paper. He kept his back square between the bag and the detective.

“Who cut your hair?” Chico asked.

The page in the sugar was not a card or a strip, but a full piece of notebook paper. When he had unearthed enough of it, David closed the top edge of the page in his fist and pulled it out whole. The action spilled sugar on the counter, his robe, the floor, the range. The sugar blackened and burned under the pot of boiling water. In one motion, he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket and leaned down to blow on the smoke rising from the burning sugar. “It was a whole group of them,” he said. He felt the grains of sugar coating his hand and wiped it on his chest. “They seemed like nice girls. Maybe they were students. They were all young.”

“The girls cut your hair.”

David poured water into the cups and spooned sugar into one. Steam blushed the spoon's edge. “One cut my toenails. I told them all not to bother, but they said they were here to do it as a favor to my wife.” The threat felt warm in his pocket.

“Could I get their names?” Chico asked.

“I don't know their names,” David said. He reasoned that if he had left the threat in the sugar, it might have dissolved and vanished. It was too important to be ruled by the normal properties of paper. Taking hold of it had been important.

Dr. Walls was beside him. “David, your hair is past your ears.”

“It was longer,” David said, handing her a cup. He touched the fuzzed nape of his neck. “You wouldn't believe.”

“Where do you keep the tea?” she asked.

David patted the front of his robe, produced one of the bags, and dropped it into her cup. He had the sense that this woman was here to trick him. He didn't trust the things she said or the way she watched him. He crossed his arms, covering his pockets so that she couldn't reach in. The woman went back to sit at the table in the seat where guests sat, the one without a place mat. She was trying to be polite. David slipped the other tea bags into the other cups.

“I'm sorry we're asking so many questions,” Chico said, accepting his tea. “I'm sure you want to get to the bottom of this as much as we do.”

“Important items have special properties,” David said.

“You have been so helpful,” said Dr. Walls.

“I believe I've maintained a tradition of cooperation with members of local law enforcement and public works operatives,” he said. “I believe that civilians ought not fear the guiding hand of the state.” He lifted the cup to his lips.

“What was that page you pulled out of the bag of sugar?” Chico asked.

David effused a small amount of bile into his tea.

“Good God,” said Dr. Walls.

“What is your name?” David asked the woman. He wiped his face with his sleeve. “What is your full name?”

The woman's teacup rattled on its saucer, though she was touching neither cup nor saucer. He saw her leg jiggling the table from underneath. “Marie Walls,” the woman said.

“Marie,” he said. “I'm sorry about all this.”

“It's all right, David.”

“I haven't been the same since my wife left.”

“David,” she said.

“I hate to state the obvious,” said Chico, “but you vomited into that cup after I asked you a question.”

“David,” Marie said. Her face elongated before him. Her eyebrows went first, pinching a delicate fold into her forehead. Her eyelids snapped up to follow and she tipped her head back slightly to accommodate the movement. She observed him from behind her cheekbones.

David was holding the paper protectively in his pocket. “It was nothing,” he said. “It was a piece of the bag that fell into the sugar. I felt ashamed to serve the sugar to guests with a piece of the bag loose inside.” He attempted a religious convert kind of gaze with the detective, but Chico's eye contact was stronger. It was clear that in a past life the detective had been a phone booth beside an empty highway. David felt the page wilting in his warm hand. The sugar stuck to his palm.

From the corner of his eye he could see that Marie was nodding. “Such a good host,” she said.

“A good host,” Chico said. He was making the kind of eye contact employed by officers of the law. He had once been a mechanical crane that hauled beams to the top of a skyscraper.

David tipped his ruined tea out in the sink, took the paper out of his pocket, and laid it on the table. Chico stood beside him and read it aloud:

I WILL STRIP THE BARK FROM A TREE AND MAKE YOU NEW CLOTHES. YOU WILL WEAR THESE CLOTHES AS YOU WANDER THE FOREST FOR FOURTEEN YEARS. YOUR FATHER WILL DIE WATCHING THE SKY AND YOUR MOTHER WILL FORGET YOUR NAME.

Chico stopped reading, but David could tell he was looking over it again, memorizing it. The man had no visible reaction beyond his jaw moving slightly down and to the left behind his closed mouth. It was enough for David to know that he should not have trusted either of his visitors.

“I don't know what to make of it,” David said.

“There are more like this?”

“No,” David said. “I found it there before. I was afraid to move it.”

“I should take it with me,” Chico said, pulling on his gloves and holding one out for the threat.

“What's happening?” Marie asked, bracing herself to stand.

“Official police business,” Chico said.

David held the threat close to his chest. “There's no police business. I can't let you have this.”

Chico made no initial response, but his jaw moved again within his closed mouth. He was tonguing the surface of his molars. He seemed exceptionally calm. “This could be considered evidence,” he said.

“There's no reason why it would be. My wife was probably playing a prank on me, and she forgot about it.” David worried that he was talking too fast. Correcting the error would be simple enough but would require talking more to the man, who was probing the grooves in his teeth as if they contained an illuminating secret. “I usually don't take sugar in my tea,” David said, slower, moderated, trying his best to sound reasonable by employing a reasonable voice, “so there was no reason for me to look here. I don't usually take sugar.”

“This could be an important piece of evidence,” said Chico.

Marie had abandoned her teacup and stood by Chico's side. “Goodness,” she said, replacing her thin glasses with thicker ones and reading the page. “Classic transferred umbilical addiction. ICD-10 F20. The coupled individual fears the opposing parental unit and conspires to destroy him or her.”

“There's no reason why you wouldn't allow us to take this,” Chico said.

“Or it's a ruse,” Marie said.

“You've been nothing but helpful so far,” Chico added. “Your attitude has helped to ease my mind regarding your status in this case.”

David folded the paper in thirds. “Ease your mind.”

“You're a person of interest, after all. That's normal procedure. You're only helping yourself by cooperating. But really, right now you're getting your fingerprints all over what could be a key piece of evidence.”

“This could be something my wife wrote as a joke,” David said. “Probably years ago.”

“David,” Marie said. Her face was the color and shape of an oblong shell, a shaved almond, a cuttlefish bone on which a parakeet might smooth its beak.

David leaned forward and gently pressed his cheek against hers. It was satisfying, though she felt nothing like an almond. “I understand your concern, but I'm beginning to grow worried for the physical object,” he said, cheek to cheek with Marie. “I believe it is within my legal right to keep it.”

“I think you should come talk to me sometime,” she said, whispering, into his ear.

Chico exhaled through his nose hard enough that David felt the blast on his face. He took a step back. “It is currently within your legal right,” Chico said. “I don't enjoy the fact that you're making that decision, though.”

David held the wilted paper aloft. “This object has sentimental value.”

“Understood,” Chico said. “We're going to compromise.”

“Compromise is the evidence of a civil class,” Marie said.

Chico produced a pocket camera. “May I?”

David looked first at the camera and then at Marie. He held the threat in his palms, protecting it, while Chico took his picture. Chico put his camera away and handed David a ziplock sandwich bag from his pocket.

“Keep it in there,” he said. “Do you have a stapler?”

David produced one from the junk drawer and Chico stapled the seal with three quick shots.

“We'll head to the salon again. I'm sure we'll find the ones that came by your home.”

They both shook David's hand on the way out, and Marie stepped over the pile of frozen clothes on the porch. On their way to the car, Chico touched her arm once above the elbow. “It may not be wise for David to have a private session just yet,” he said.

“It would be a safe space for him.”

He opened her car door, stepped around the back, and got into the driver's seat. “Maybe soon.” As they backed out of the driveway, Chico leveraged his arm against her seat while Marie watched the garage in front of her shrink back into the forest. The garage looked like a second house. She could see one pair of old wooden French doors propped slightly ajar by a substantial wasp's nest that grew between the doors and held them in place.

Inside, David examined the threat. Specks of sugar had fallen to the bottom of the sandwich bag. He thought about the absolute fact that a great number of details had gone unnoticed. He reheated the pot of water, filled his empty cup with sugar. The cup was full to its brim with sugar, and he had to put it in the sink when he poured the hot water in. The sugar sank under the liquid and clouded it, and David stirred it with a small spoon and blew across the surface before sipping the murky, sweet mixture, his lips pursed, his tongue lashing forward. He was a hummingbird. He held the cup at the center of his body, over his heart, wincing as the cup's contents splashed over the lip and onto his fingers.

 

27.

THE YEARS had made Franny literal. It got to the point that when she found something funny, she would say so without laughing. David didn't mind it. He appreciated a literal woman.

Some winter, years before, they had watched a man struggle up the icy hill in front of their home. He plunged silver picks into the ice like an Alpine climber. The man slipped and howled as he fell, digging his pick into his own hand. He slid down the ice in a bloodied mass. Franny smiled, watching. “That was funny,” she said. She always asked to see comedies when they went to the movies. He would turn toward her during the funniest parts to find her bobbing her head in agreement. It was as if the characters were explaining the concept of humor to her and she was indicating that she understood. She moved her lips at the movie theater without making a sound.

The only time she would really laugh was when David tried to compare her job to the one he had just been forced to leave. The first time he tried, they were finishing a bottle of wine, standing at the kitchen counter.

“You deal in mystery just as I did,” David said. She was laughing before he began, but he had thought it all out while taking his coffee on the porch earlier that day and was set on sharing. “At your job, you shake a woman's hand, look at her face, she seems fine. But then you get her back, remove her makeup, shine the exam light on her, and you see everything she's hiding. Comedones, age spots, pencil-thin lines. You bring them up and she starts apologizing. ‘I know, I should be wearing more sunscreen. I just ran out and forgot to get more.'

“It was exactly the same at my job. I would meet a perfectly nice person, maybe a spectacularly nice person, a minister or a pharmacist, the kind of person I was raised to trust. Then I'd get into his mouth and it would be a disaster. Infection swelling a gum line like a hidden pouch. Trench mouth leaving a gray film on the teeth. Ulcers full of six months' worth of midnight snacks without even a rinse afterward. Back to bed. The guy would say, ‘Doc, you gotta understand, I brush my teeth almost every day.' He'd have no reason to lie to me but he would lie. We'd see it all the time.”

Franny, pressing her lips together, let out a stifled laugh that startled them both. She set down her wineglass and covered her mouth with both hands. “I'm sorry,” she said, snorting. Her face reddened to the ears. “I'm sorry, that's not funny. I'm sorry. I think you're right.”

He watched her red ears and felt a lightness in his chest that he hadn't felt since they were dating. From then on, he made a small special effort to compare his old profession to hers. It was so good to see her laugh that he didn't mind. Sometimes she would lean over and hold his hand or even kiss him between peals of laughter. He saved the comparison for special occasions, such as their anniversary.

 

28.

THERE WERE TWO UPSETTING THINGS about the new threat. One item of concern rested in the body of David's father, the other in the body of his mother.

When David and Franny were in their fifth year of marriage, they moved in with his father. This meant moving into David's childhood home, a dark-wooded, many-roomed house on the old side of town. David and Franny had spent the years prior renting their own apartment, but when his father needed help walking from kitchen to basement and eventually from bedroom to bathroom, David found himself spending nights on the sag-springed bed in his first bedroom, and then nights plus weekends, and finally all of the time. He returned to his wife and their apartment, where the landlord wouldn't allow them to put nails in the walls. Their picture frames leaned against the walls from their permanent spots on the floor.